King bummer: Mute, the new film from Duncan Jones, sort of kind of really, really, reeeeeally sucks.

I’m a fan of Jones dating back to his debut, Moon, which, hey, good news – that movie is still super great. (Additionally, Source Code, his follow-up to Moon, remains solid, too, though a much lesser effort than Moon.) But the more movies Jones has made since, the less I recognize him as the guy who made Moon, and that’s saying something because Mute has a direct reference to Moon right there for all of us to see.

The trouble is that Mute can’t hold a candle to Moon, or to Blade Runner, or to literally any of the sci-fi sacred cows it’s related to. As I wrote for The Playlist, Jones has become “invisible in his own pastiche.” That sentence was painful to bang out, I’m telling you.